This isn't a recipe, nor is it instructions to anyone other than me, it's just a statement of where I am right now in terms of baking bread. Some will be appalled, others might be inspired. Most probably won't care!

Right now, I'm keeping it simple. When we moved from San Francisco, CA, to Norfolk, VA, we found that there really wasn't the kind of bread here that we were used to. At that point, I sort of fell in to teaching myself to make european style breads, of the kind that we used to buy from Acme and Semifreddi. Since my wife and I have always cooked and cooked fairly well, we had a pretty well-equipped kitchen (including large, heavy mixing bowls, and some strong wooden spoons, a pizza stone+peel kit someone gave us once, and so on). I haven't bought any new equipment for bread baking, and that's the way I like it. I mix and knead by hand,  I score with a very sharp german-made paring knife, I bake on a pizza stone.

Since I've developed a little skill and some small understanding of how breads work, I've stopped measuring much of anything for breads I make frequently. I use measuring cups to scoop flour and carry water around so I know roughly where I am at, but mostly I follow my nose around familiar recipes. My goal is to understand the way the dough should feel, and to adjust it as I go. Sometimes I am trying to make it feel the same way it did last time, other times I'm playing a little 'what if it's a little wetter? I wonder what the result will be' game.

Consistency, as you will have guessed by now, is not something that matters to me. I have enough understanding to know that the result will probably be good, whatever it is. If it's a slightly different loaf from last time, well, perhaps I will learn something about how changes in handling change the loaf, and as a bonus, my family gets a new bread to enjoy!

Things I do worry about and take some care with:

• dough temperature (I'm not completely fussy, but I do try to cool things down when the ambient temperature is too high, and heat things up when.. well, this is Virginia, it's not really too cold very much of the time).
• salt, which I worry about to the extent of having a base idea of where it should be, and adjusting up or down a bit if I've got a bit more or less dough than the basic recipe.

Note that even here I'm not measuring, I'm following my nose, just to push things in the right direction. Nothing is too extreme here, so even these rough adjustments get the temperature within a couple degrees of right, and the salt within a gram or two of optimal. And, hey, every error yields a "new" kind of bread!

Anyways. This is really just a note to a future me, and maybe someone else will find something herein they can use!

Maybe this is unsolicited advice, but here goes... 

For those of you who have tried recipes and have failed, my advice to you is to make note of what went wrong, and try it again.  Try it again until you it works for you.  And keep trying until it comes out how you want it to.  This is the only way to get better.  Success is not a very good teacher.  Learning from your mistakes is...  This applies not only to baking bread, but life in general...

Tim